I’m not saying anything negative Democrats or doing any comparison on idiologies. I feel like echo chambers keeping politics in their own little bubbles is bad for everyone. I just wanted your opinion on echo chambers being applicable to both sides. Don’t know why I can’t ask a question without getting down voted.
It’s because the way you are posing questions is disingenuous. It’s an article about issues with the Republican party and voter base and you turn around and go, “well, yeah, but there are two sides so Democrats must be the same right???” It’s like you can’t even discuss the topic at hand, you have to make it a “both sides” thing.
But sure, I’ll bite. Do Democrats have huge numbers of talk radio stations, shitty news stations, and grifting facebook pages all pushing the same bullshit? Because Republicans do, and they all for some reason talk about the same shit in the same way. You can hem and haw about how MSNBC could be more “neutral,” but it doesn’t hold a candle to the ridiculousness of Fox News. And if it did, don’t worry, we’ve still got OANN to talk about.
Democratic echo chambers amount to “we don’t like you saying racial slurs in our forum,” where Republican echo chambers amount to “don’t you dare post that scientific study or countermand the will of the Great Leader.” They aren’t the same, no matter how desperate you are to equivocate.
don’t you dare post that scientific study or countermand the will of the Great Leader
Post something about transgender athletes in women’s sports, or how boarder protections are a positive. You’ll get smashed to bits in the exact same way.
The echo chambers are there for both side and reasonable discussion of middle ground has been eliminated from American discourse.
What do you feel are the problematic issues stemming from the “dem echo chamber”?
Oooh, can I play?
Tribalism is the real problem and the echo chambers are where it’s fostered. The inability to see a fact, event, or report clearly without blue-tinted glasses can stand in the way of progress.
Of course a segment of the right has some weird issues with accepting science as fact – or facts as facts. It wasn’t long ago this fringe population was ignored and isolated while mainstream middle America politics existed (relatively) out in the open. The echo chamber everyone is living in right now is this - social media. This is not reality. This is not you and I sitting down and having a face-to-face chat about our lives and experiences and how we can agree and disagree on things regardless of who we’ve voted for.
Our extreme political polarization exists because of the internet. The internet is not where we’re going to solve this problem. Just because we generally all agree that “the left” is right correct, arguing over facts and truths with people who’s primary objective is to reject them is not going to foster progress. Arguing over what laws should exist in one state and not another and if the Constitution even allows for such laws is not going to be resolved in a Xweet. You may win the battle but the war will certainly carry on without you.
The “dem echo chamber” is made up of virtue signaling propaganda (as is MAGA). It’s selling rally towels outside a football game and people are just there to have a good time cheering along for their team. The teams are dressed in red and blue but the QB is still rich and the D-Line is still poor.
I also feel like the left’s use of social media to call out the stupidity and malice and atrocities of the right strengthens the right’s defenses and their numbers. What in the past may have been a small story in a local paper now can become an international headline within minutes. I generally think this is a good thing but there’s a lot of overly sensitive people who feel like the internet is reality and they can be susceptible to intimidation and bullying. As the echo bounces around the left’s chamber, the right aren’t getting weaker, they’re getting stronger.
“Facts” aside, I see very little difference in the echo chambers and tribalism.
Which brings us to the right’s issue with facts. To be brief, there was a study that showed brains of conservatives are actually a little different than those of liberals. Conservatives are more protective. They’re afraid of change and threats to their families and communities. They have real not-invalid concerns. So, when presented with actual facts and science that attack their stance and weaken their protections, they’re going to fight harder, even is that means using “fantasy” as their reality to “prove” you wrong.
The problem with these echo chambers and tribalism is that people are locking themselves in and forgoing real world conversations that involve vulnerability, humility, and negotiations. No one is interested in taking the time to give the other person a chance to step outside their echo chamber. All they want is to be right and to convince the other they’re wrong.
Now, to be fair, I do not have an answer as to what to do about literal textbook definition fascists trying to take control of our government. If I were a more well educated about WWII, I might have an idea about what not to do.
People have called me out in the past for being an idealist and that I’m not considering the reality of the situation. I feel pretty strongly that the issue is people not stepping outside their echo chambers to take a look at the reality they actually have control over. I also feel very strongly that Ranked Choice Voting would quell the vast majority of the polarization found in politics and social issues.
All they want is to be right and to convince the other they’re wrong.
Beyond convincing them they’re wrong, it can seem they want the righteous vindication of a concession. They want their opposing interlocutor to proclaim the error of their ways and denounce their former position. It can lead to just beating down an opponent to the point they don’t even reflect on the full discourse. Sometimes you need to make some solid points and leave it at that. When people are flat out denying facts they usually fall into one of two groups. The first group are the Fucker Carlsons and Bitch McConnells of the world. They know they’re lying and pointing out facts won’t matter. The other group is people who haven’t employed much critical thinking to the “facts” the first group provides. Either they’ve fully committed to the lies and are lost causes, they haven’t had the time to truly flesh out their positions, or they might categorically lack the mental faculties to use critical thinking.
For the former group, they are playing their role and won’t change no matter how foolproof your argument. So putting out facts at the forefront can help to have that information available to contrast the propaganda should someone from the latter group see.
For the latter group, no one wants to be wrong. So being systematically shown to have been duped and lied to can cause some pretty typical defense mechanisms. Enter cognitive dissonance. So making a few points and trying to not be abrasive or confrontational can set them a little more at ease. You need to allow them some time to process. Trying to force some “win” can cause them to just dig in deeper to their preconceived notions. Then it’s harder to pull them out.
It’s not about “dem echo chambers” to me it’s about echo chambers in general. The problems I think they cause are more devision, less ability to reflect on held beliefs, and make it difficult to have conversations or debates with those who old different beliefs. Again this is specific to echo chambers in general.
My brain has stopped functioning since this AM 🤣 but that’s fair re: “echo chambers in general” - just the “both sides” rhetoric and the specific questions about “dem echo chambers” had me wondering what specific problematic issues were stemming from that. I was gonna be specific but I can no longer find/follow the convo - Oy old age ig - thank for taking the time to answer.
You have fallen into one of the liberal echo chamber traps. I like to think these traps were born of genuinely good intent and have simply been overused. An issue that liberal echo chambers can have is bad faith actors trolling the various forums and social media. For example, an unabashedly “pro-life” conservative wading into the topic of abortion calling themselves “pro-choice”. Then they start Just Asking Questions and ultimately reveal they think the choice should be to not have sex. And once someone is pregnant, they’ve made a choice and now must live with the consequences.
So liberals have these “traps” that started as somewhat of a defense mechanism. Rather than waste time attempting to truly flesh out a position with someone acting in bad faith, they will begin the process by sort of vetting the person. If you ask the “wrong questions” or provide the “wrong answers”, you’ll be effectively labeled a bad faith person. This will be evident initially by a flurry of downvotes on a few comments. Once the avalanche has started, it’s hard to avoid. People will barely peruse your comments and follow the judgement that you are acting in bad faith.
It makes it impossible to play devil’s advocate or really dig deep on topics that have tons of nuance and layers. Once a comment chain gets long enough maybe 1 or 2 other people will still follow it. If you’ve been judged earlier on, any valid points or questions you proffer will be ignored and/or downvoted.
FWIW I’ve come to describe myself as “horrifically liberal”. Even given that, I have been downvoted to oblivion on topics where I didn’t pass whatever purity test the first few viewers required.
Edit: as you can see, I’ve already been downvoted. Basically proving exactly what I said in my post.
The idea that all Republicans are literal Nazis who can’t be worked with.
It sure would be easier to counter that idea if the republicans’ leading contender for speaker of the house wasn’t someone who described himself as “David Duke without the baggage”. I guess technically the former grand wizard of the KKK wasn’t a literal nazi, but that doesn’t seem like a hair worth splitting.
I think anyone can be in an eco chamber regardless of your political beliefs. I think it is less likely for Democrats as their news isn’t just a single channel that has been proven to not be news.
Right wing news is from the limited sources it is because those are the only sources that will align with their biases. Most other news sources align with center-left or farther left biases depending on the source. This is very much about the market - the largest population centers tend to lean left so there’s a bigger market, it comes down to whether an outlet is trying to get a smaller slice of a much larger pie or a bigger slice of the smaller pie that right wing outlets share - it’s a lot easier to get a big market share when there’s less competition.
For an example of the sorts of biases you see - let’s look at hate crimes against Asians resulting from COVID.
Left leaning sources would upsell that increase in hate crimes, but weirdly avoid using any specific examples or saying anything about who was perpetuating them other than some vague statements about “white supremacy” and blaming the increase on Trump calling COVID a Chinese virus. Well, until one day when all the talk about it started using one specific example of a white guy hate criming an Asian, but that was a couple months after they’d started talking about the topic.
Right leaning sources would ignore or avoid the topic until they couldn’t get away with that any more. Then they focused on who was doing said hate crimes, because by the numbers it was mostly black-on-Asian hate crime, and blacks being criminals is aligned with their biases. This is the same reason why left leaning sources tried to avoid who was doing the hate crimes against Asians until they had a prominent example with a white perp - it’s hard to sell black folks acting in the name of white supremacy, and blacks being criminals is not aligned with their biases.
